“America is the greatest country ever invented to be completely out of your mind,” Charlie Pierce wrote in 2015. Pierce was reacting to Ben Carson’s crank theories about the pyramids.
When Erich von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods?” was a best-seller (speaking of pyramids), Johnny Carson asked a NASA astronaut what he thought of von Daniken’s theories about aliens influencing human history. After a pause, the astronaut replied that when von Daniken looks around the world and sees something he doesn’t understand, he attributes it to aliens. And since there’s a lot in this world von Daniken doesn’t understand, he finds them everywhere.
Watching Brother Giuliani’s traveling Republican salvation show last year, it was clear most of his Trump-fawning witnesses to “massive fraud” applied von Däniken’s approach to the 2020 election. Whenever they saw an election process they did not understand, they attributed it to voter fraud. And since there was a lot about election processes they didn’t understand, they saw fraud everywhere.
Now, Texas has empowered those same untrained randos to supervise elections and women’s reproductive health.
Dahlia Lithwick and Scott Pilutik consider the consequences for Slate. With passage of S.B. 1 and S.B. 8, Texas is “empowering and emboldening those who are certain they know what the law is, and isolating and terrifying those who are uncertain and require assistance and clarification. Texas isn’t only rewarding vigilantes; it’s threatening anyone who might get in their way.”
The acts are two sides of the same coin that void the right to privacy in traditionally private decisions:
S.B. 8 all but guarantees that every aspect of a pregnant person’s life, from last menstrual period to private consultations with counselors, is on public display. In a paradoxical way, S.B. 8 says that one is entitled to medical privacy and bodily autonomy in all matters except reproduction, and that these choices are to be aired in public and litigated by anyone and everyone. S.B. 1 similarly inserts anyone who calls himself a poll watcher into a private act of voting; it asks that voters run the gantlet of neighbors and activists, in order to be seen and heard at the ballot box.
On Jan. 6, a marauding legion of Trump supporters formed an ad hoc committee of private attorneys general and violently attempted to overturn the United States election. Rather than viewing that episode as a teachable moment about the particular dangers of empowering inchoate political rage, Republicans in Texas and elsewhere are placating that same angry beast as if that dark day was a negotiation opening. “Maybe you took it a bit too far that time, but you were basically right” is the message conveyed, in essence.
Not only are Republican vigilantes entitled to their own facts, in Texas they are entitled to enforce their own interpretions of law. And you are not.
This contagion will spread like Delta.